Planetarization and Heimatlosigkeit, Part 2

Continued from “Planetarization and Heimatlosigkeit, Part 1”

One might feel at ease being at home. As everyone knows, mother tongue and family networks may not make life less onerous, but they do make access to certain things much easier. A Japanese colleague living in London once told me that he couldn’t eat British vegetables, and that his wife had to buy vegetables freshly delivered from Japan at the Japan Centre in Leicester Square. But he still didn’t feel at home, because when he went to meetings at the university, even though he worked in a Japanese Studies department, the standpoint was always British or pan-European. In the end he decided to go back to Japan, where he felt at home. Another friend’s mother loved the old Bahnhof in Stuttgart; after her death, as a native German, he managed to acquire a stone from the Bahnhof and used it as a gravestone for her. For an immigrant living in Germany, such a gesture would be nearly impossible because the amount of bureaucracy one would need to go through would be too exhausting.

This is not something that Immanuel Kant could have imagined, because the great philosopher of cosmopolitanism never left Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia). According to Kant, world citizenship grants a “right of resort” or right to hospitality. He argued that the earth is shared by everyone, and that one should have the right to visit other countries and be welcomed as a guest. And he was quite right: the earth shouldn’t be regarded as someone’s private property, and one ought to have the right to wander on this planet without being harmed or arrested. Even if one is refused entry to a country, it should not be done with hostility.

However, the concept of world citizenship is still built upon an opposition between home and non-home, internal and external. Today, the right of visitation (to non-home, external nations) is contested by the ownership of all kinds of resources including natural and human resources, and a foreigner’s activities are limited to sightseeing and shopping. The concepts of the border and the visa, inventions in the name of national security, are grounded upon the concept of private property and the household. In many modern Western states, a good citizen is a good taxpayer; naturalization is evaluated according to the amount of tax and pension one has paid. Today we have tourists who are not entitled to work in foreign countries, but who have the right to travel—provided that their passport, the symbol of the status of their Heimat, is strong enough. The Japanese, for instance, have the right to visit more than one hundred and ninety countries without a visa, while Afghans in 2023 could go to no more than thirty countries.

In “Christianity or Europe” (1799), Novalis reproached the uniformity of reason he sensed in the work of Enlightenment thinkers, and romanticized the “beautiful and splendid times” of the Middle Ages, when love and faith effectively suppressed individualism and violence.1 But what Novalis regarded as a cosmopolitanism has become paradoxically anti-cosmopolitan because, once again, it has turned to a longing or nostalgia for a Heimat which is no longer. What might be the response of philosophy in the twenty-first century when confronting the techno-economic force that seems to have put an end to so many beliefs of the past? Can we only envision the annihilation of technology as an antidote to the annihilation of nature? If Heimat was the condition of world citizenship, what happened to the world citizen when we entered into an epoch of Heimatlosigkeit? Heidegger does far more than just denounce technology: consider his reference to the mysterious verse of Hölderlin’s Patmos, “But where the danger is, grows the saving power also.” This is comparable to what Hegel called the cunning of reason: the danger is a constant reminder of a different path which sheds light upon the question of Being. Thus, if modern technology means the end or completion of Western philosophy and metaphysics, then something has to arise from such an end, something that exceeds technological enframing (Gestell).

The NSK Passport. Anybody can become a bearer of an NSK Passport and acquire the status of an NSK citizen. In its founding statements, the NSK State rejects the categories of (defined) territory and the principle of national borders and advocates the law of transnationality.

Heidegger answered these questions with “the other beginning,” and Derrida responded with “the other heading.”2 Heidegger was still haunted by Heimat, but such a Heimat in the end was no longer the black forest but Greece, a Greece seen as both beginning and end. The return to Greece is a recursive movement; however, the completion of the loop took more than two and a half thousand years. Are we now entering into another loop, or are we heading elsewhere?

Didn’t Heidegger then play the role of Hyperion, and in this sense, isn’t Heidegger united with Hölderlin?

Heimatlosigkeit will continue to be a characteristic of twenty-first-century planetarization unless a conservative revolution takes place everywhere in the world and all of a sudden the world order is changed, as Fichte imagined in The Closed Commercial State (1800), in which he proposed that each state should close off its commercial activities from other states. Today Fichte could be regarded as a thinker of anti-globalization; his proposal could be read in today’s vocabulary as “decoupling.” Since 2019, the United States and China have entered into a trade war; during the pandemic, China, a communist regime, accused the US, a capitalist regime, of being anti-globalization and damaging the free market. This would have been unimaginable during the 1990s, when the US was the strongest promoter of globalization and when free market ideology announced the “end of history.” One could certainly read this dialectically, and propose the end of the end of history as a negation of negation; however, this does not really enlighten us much further than affording the satisfactions of playing a dialectical game.

Can we take Heimatlosigkeit further as a default then? Or as a fate even? If we don’t look at the world from the standpoint of home, can we look at it from the perspective of Heimatlosigkeit? Specifically, could we try to engage with this world from the perspective of ruins—the ruins that are produced by economic and technological globalization? World history, we could then say, is a history of liberation from Heimat, which was initially physically bounded, and later came to be defined culturally. But what would it mean to think from the standpoint of Heimatlosigkeit?

In this sense, maybe Jean-François Lyotard has already given us some hints with his thesis on the postmodern. The postmodern condition is a technological condition, in the sense that technological development has sublated the modernity that produced it. If the modern began with a sense of certainty and security, as in Descartes’s meditations, where such certainty is the only possible beginning of knowledge and its guarantee, the postmodern condition is one under which knowledge no longer emanates from the human subject. Instead, technologies—robotics, artificial intelligence, databases, synthetic biology, etc.—exceed human-centered knowledge production and subvert the relation between the subject and its knowledge. Under the postmodern condition, one no longer finds oneself at home. Instead, one finds oneself in an insecure and uncertain world which is at the same time open and fearful. The postmodern is today largely understood as an aesthetics or a genre of literature or cinema, but for Lyotard it was far more than that. The postmodern condition gestures towards the questioning of the significance of not being at home, of being unheimisch and unheimlich.

The standpoint is shifted, the world is turned upside down. When Husserl wrote his polemical essay “The Original Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move,” he was also thinking of the earth as a home, but not as a celestial body, as Copernicus had treated it.3 Husserl wasn’t wrong, and neither was Copernicus, but whether the phenomenological method is superior to the mathematical method is another issue. We are told by Nietzsche that “since Copernicus, man has been rolling from the centre toward X,” faster and faster into nothingness;4 and yet after Copernicus, the philosophy of the subjective prevailed, as Descartes’s meditations restored the human being to its status as the origin of all certainty. Later, Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations attempted to give the most indubitable place to the ego. Husserl was right to emphasize the phenomenological aspect of the body, but he did so only on the basis of thinking the body from a specific point of view, namely that of a human standing on the earth. When the standpoint is switched, then the phenomenological method becomes questionable. Copernicus and the modern physicists who followed him considered the earth from a standpoint that is no longer on the earth but outside of it—a standpoint that was not yet phenomenologically valid. With the launch of the Sputnik and later the Apollo program, which were able to send back images of the “blue marble” observed from outside, the situation radically changed. Hannah Arendt was very much aware of this when she declared in The Human Condition that this was the foremost scientific event of the twentieth century.5

Space exploration has definitively rendered the earth just one celestial body among many. The earth was considered by Buckminster Fuller as a spaceship, with humans as its passengers. The earth may have been an original ark upon which humans embarked, but now it is possible for humans to leave this ark, something which inspires great excitement: Mars is a potential alternative; as Elon Musk tells us on the website of SpaceX: “I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” Although at present this remains a futuristic prospect, the view of the earth from outside has already rendered Husserl’s standpoint only one possibility among others. In other words, the earth has ceased to be Heimat, and is henceforth only a spaceship.

Earthrise, October 12, 2015. Image by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera science team.

A standpoint defines the direction of the gaze, but also limits it and affects the body to which the gaze belongs. Looking at world history from the standpoint of Japan, and vice versa, before and during the Second World War, a Japanese philosopher might be forgiven for having overemphasized the importance of Japan as a decisive moment in that world history. During the first symposium “The Standpoint of World History and Japan” organized by the journal Chūō Kōron on November 26, 1941, Keiji Nishitani lamented Europeans’ inability to look at the world from a different standpoint: “In general Europeans, even now, seem to me to be unable to shake their habit of always viewing the world from a European perspective [見地].”6 According to Nishitani, Europe perceived a crisis without knowing that this crisis emerged out of the collapse of the relation that it had maintained with the East. As the dialogue unfolds, Nishitani recalls that, on his way back to Japan from Germany, he was offered a book titled The Battlefront of the Coloured Race by a man from Switzerland travelling on the same ship. Nishitani reports the conclusion of his reading as follows: “One of the most important consequences of this change [in reality] is that Europe is becoming merely one region among others.”7 Wasn’t this precisely what brought a sense of Heimatlosigkeit to Europe? And wasn’t it this change of standpoint that allowed Nishitani to reclaim his own Heimat as, in a certain sense, post-Europe—as that which succeeds Europe as the center of the world? As he says:

The transformation now under way is the stuff of crisis for Europeans, while here it takes the form of a new world order. And when we discover that we are able to conceive of new concepts of world history and the philosophy of world history here in Japan now [現在日本で], this ability arises, I suspect, from the [very] gap in consciousness about which I have been speaking.

What we hear in these symposiums of the Kyoto School philosophers is that Europe’s loss of centrality in the world is taken to imply also the prominence of Japan as agent of world history.8 In other words, Japan’s significance can only be seen from the standpoint of a world history in which the world spirit has already departed from Europe owing to its decline, as witnessed by Oswald Spengler and many others. However, we might want to ask whether Japan was not also disoriented in this process of modernization—that is to say, whether its becoming the center of East Asia was not also something unheimlich. It didn’t seem so to Nishitani, but we or the next generation may be able to analyze it differently. In order to compete with Europe to be the center of the world or to be the world itself, Japan had to undergo a more intensified process of modernization so as to catch up and surpass the European nations. The “inferiority” of Japan or Asian countries in general to Europe could only be sublated through the reorientation of Japan from the standpoint of world history, a world history evaluated from the standpoint of Japan. There is a paradox at play here, since it was this same process of modernization that gave Japan (as well as other East Asian countries) confidence to enter onto the stage of world history, but it also produced a ressentiment of Heimatlosigkeit, which resulted in a persisting antagonism between East and West in the East Asian psyche. What we have here is yet another process of dis-orientation.

In 1941 Nishitani envisioned a “post-Europe” whose existence would later be pronounced from within by Jan Patočka: after the Second World War, Europe ceased to be the world power.9 In recognizing this fact, Nishitani wanted to elevate Japan to the status of the main protagonist of world history, one that emerges in light of the decline of the West, while Patočka, like Heidegger, would seek to go back to the ancient Greeks—although rather than the question of Being, he sought an answer in Plato’s doctrine of the care of the soul. But was Nishitani’s analysis of the decline of Europe accurate? Or did a misjudgment of it lead to a profound disorientation that he himself failed to grasp? Nothing is more ironic than when we compare what Nishitani said about the Second World War with what Heidegger later analyzed as the end of philosophy. Recall Heidegger’s famous verdict in his 1964 “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”: “The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world civilization based upon Western European thinking.”10

This contrast reveals something unheimlich. The new world order that Nishitani and other Kyoto School thinkers talked about, and which was used to justify the moral obligation of Japan to invade other Asian countries upon gaining self-consciousness of its own place in world history, is nothing but the continuation of Western European thinking. It would be curious to know what Nishitani would have had to say about Heidegger’s assertion. Surely world history seen from the standpoint of Japan awakened by European, or more precisely German historicism, continues to be the unfolding of the Western Geist. In other words, Heimat is that which manifests itself like a mirage emerging from the desert of Heimatlosigkeit.

However, when one looks at the world from the standpoint of Heimatlosigkeit, something is opened up in an uncanny way, because there is no longer a home, fixed identity is sublated, and history and place are charged with new meanings. The ideology of Heimat as a fixed time and place reveals itself to be reactionary, in the sense that it cannot negate the planetary condition. It can only reproduce a politics of nostalgia and exclusion. Confrontation with the Other and freedom of movement reproduce the ideology of Heimat. This doesn’t mean that we consider planetarization as something desirable, but rather that, as a historical consequence, it cannot be completely negated. However, we have to overcome it. And to overcome planetarization is to re-orient ourselves, in order to redefine a locality or a situatedness. Indeed, one of the major failures of the twentieth century was the inability to articulate the relation between locality and technology, and a reliance upon an almost standardized ecological thinking endowed with a strong European humanism; technology was received as a provocation to either a reactionary politics based on a dualism between tradition and modernity, or a fanatical accelerationism which believes that the problems that we have inherited will finally be resolved by technological advancement, whether it be geoengineering for repairing the earth or the subversion of capitalism by accelerating toward full automation. From the economic and technocratic perspective, there is very little value in taking locality into consideration besides its relevance to the availability of natural resources or other potential economic values.

It is clear that, for Heidegger, to overcome doesn’t mean to negate. Instead, it means to look for another path which bypasses the framework of planetarization. The homecoming of Heidegger to ancient Greece was an attempt to retrieve the question of Being. This questioning however also prevents Heidegger’s thinking from opening to the Other. One steps back in order to move forward; however, such a stepping back is also a distancing from the Other. Even though Heidegger became interested in Daoism and Buddhism through his Japanese students, he refused the idea that looking to the East could afford the possibility of overcoming modernity, since for him to overcome modernity meant first of all to adopt an orientation toward Heimat. In so doing, Heidegger became a “state thinker,” as did his disciples such as Keiji Nishitani and Alexander Dugin.

One might contest that Heidegger is not a state thinker but a thinker of the people. We will have to make a distinction here: a state thinker is one who takes the state as the absolute for the people, that is to say, one for whom without the state there is no people; a thinker of the people is one who reactivates the historical resources sedimented among the people in order to call for and welcome a new becoming. We leave it to the reader to judge which kind of thinker Heidegger is. But more importantly, perhaps we have to confront the following question: How can one avoid becoming a state thinker; can one avoid it at all? It was the hero who founded the city in ancient Greece, and to become a state thinker is to yield to the temptation of such a heroic act; even the wise Plato couldn’t resist returning to Syracuse twice to persuade Dionysius II to realize his theory concerning laws and government, even though his first visit to Syracuse ended up in unfortunate circumstances, when he was sold as slave by Dionysius I, the father of Dionysius II, as we are told in the Seventh Letter. The state needs thinkers, thinkers need the state, and therefore thinkers become the thinkers of Heimat because Heimat legitimates the state as the organism of the people.

A state thinker elevates their Heimat above other places in the world and attempts to seize the decisive moment of historical development from its standpoint—the unification of philosophy and power. In past centuries, almost every philosopher was addressed according to nationality, and a new school of thought was often prefixed with a nationality. A thinker can only go beyond the nation-state by becoming heimatlos, that is to say, by looking at the world from the standpoint of not being at home. This doesn’t mean that one must refrain from talking or thinking about a particular place or a culture; on the contrary, one must confront it and access it from the perspective of a planetary future.

Heimatlosigkeit becomes a standpoint from which to reflect on the planetary condition, and world history can only be reviewed from the standpoint of Heimatlosigkeit. One nation can no longer be said to be ahead of others in the journey of the world spirit; instead, philosophical reason must address the planetary condition and therefore become planetary. But in this case, not being at home is at the same time being at home, since home and not being at home are not opposed to one another. Not being at home means being somewhere else; being somewhere else doesn’t have to be opposed to being at home. Instead, not being at home allows one to know better both being at home and being in the world.